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It’s her; she’s the issue, Taylor Swift confesses on her new hit “Anti-Hero.” Yet listeners who’ve points along with her tenth authentic studio album, Midnights, are blaming another person: Jack Antonoff, who co-wrote 12 of its 13 songs and co-produced all of them. Ever because the different rocker acquired his massive break into pop manufacturing with Swift’s 2014 track “Out of the Woods,” he has grow to be a go-to collaborator for titans together with Lorde, Lana Del Rey, and Diana Ross. But Midnights is Antonoff and Swift’s first album-length team-up. His guileless, bespectacled face options in her newest music video. And he’s the middle of the principle controversy surrounding her new album: Is it any good?
Selling higher in its first week than any album prior to now seven years, and receiving its share of upbeat evaluations, Midnights is plainly a hit for Swift. Yet each followers and haters have needed to reckon with the truth that though one of the best Swift albums have advanced her sound, this one takes a U-turn. Midnights’ moody synth pop recollects the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack that outlined the zeitgeist of 2015. Its melodies and rhythms resemble earlier moments in Swift’s catalog—and Antonoff’s—to a distracting diploma, making the challenge really feel a bit redundant. The most fawning, fannish evaluations tackle this problem by politely nicking the producer (“Antonoff’s extensive credits mean he has a hard time preventing musical ideas from bleeding into each other,” says BuzzFeed). Other takes merely name for Antonoff to go to jail.
For a behind-the-scenes collaborator to be so central to a pop album’s reception is, in a means, refreshing. Mass-market artwork is at all times collaborative, and too typically, superstars corresponding to Swift get portrayed as solo auteurs or puppets for a shadowy company. Really, typically, they’re extra like staff leaders. But the Antonoff backlash doesn’t get that proper, both. The dialogue round Midnights amplifies shaky assumptions in regards to the ever-mysterious inventive course of, downplays the components which have made Antonoff a key drive in latest music, and dangers doing one thing that Swift would hate: ascribing her authorship to a person.
The time period producer can discuss with an entire vary of actions. Some producers principally simply seize the sound of artists taking part in their very own music within the studio. Some, in contrast, are like one-person bands who whip up accompaniment for a vocalist. Some producers are beatmakers who ship their contributions by e mail. Some are tyrants who use the singer as a mere ingredient for their very own creation (and, in lots of instances traditionally, exploit or abuse the singer within the course of). And some are therapists-slash-craftspeople, coaxing an artist to pour out their soul after which serving to form the outcomes.
By all accounts, Antonoff falls into that final class. Cutting towards the domineering archetype set by Phil Spector, he is called a listener and a technician who’s particularly good at working with ladies. (“I write a full octave above where I sing … There’s just a lot of melodic DNA that works better for women than men,” he advised Pitchfork in 2017.) A 2022 New Yorker profile depicted Antonoff’s speciality for turning hanging out into an artwork type: Casual banter within the studio results in deeper conversations, which bleed into jam periods, which coalesce into tracks. The supposed level is to make musicians sound extra like themselves. “Who is this person, and what is the absolute most right-to-the-bone way of expressing them?” Antonoff stated after I interviewed him in 2019. “How do you cut all the bullshit out?”
Yet Antonoff additionally has a recognizable sound. His affection for the Nineteen Eighties—each the karaoke-ready rock of Bon Jovi and the campy roboticism of Depeche Mode—comes by way of in classic gear he makes use of, and in his penchant for placing daring, reverberating vocals on the heart of the combination. As a songwriter, he breaks with tight-and-tidy Max Martin varieties: The melodies in Antonoff songs take rambling, careening shapes, recognizing hip-hop’s perception that syncopated talking will be as catchy as tuneful singing. Close listeners can level to different tics and tips. Caleb Gamman, a video producer who went viral for snarking on Midnights’ manufacturing, advised Vice that Antonoff’s signatures embrace “detuned oscillators,” “‘Christian music’ harmonies,” and “digital tinkly stuff.”
Still, Antonoff’s monitor document is hardly a narrative of homogeneity. Just evaluate two traditional albums he virtually completely produced and co-wrote: Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! in 2019 and Lorde’s Melodrama in 2017. Del Rey’s album channeled Baby Boomer rock right into a Twenty first-century masterpiece that included cozy piano ballads and a virtually 10-minute showcase for Antonoff’s guitar taking part in. The vibe of the album was intricate and shaggy, like some heat, fine-woven blanket. Melodrama, in contrast, was a futuristic cityscape rendered in synth pop: laborious beats, gushing keyboards, exclamatory whispers. Though massively completely different, the albums each comprise a few of the finest pop songs of the previous decade. They reveal that Antonoff’s worth just isn’t a lot a selected sound however an ear for reconciling punchiness and persona.
His work with Swift demonstrates this identical variability. Some of their finest songs collectively—“Out of the Woods,” “Cruel Summer,” “Getaway Car”—are stereotypical Antonoff, blowing the aesthetic of a New Jersey video-game arcade to area scale. But then you’ve gotten a monitor corresponding to “Lover,” a dusky rock ballad from 2019 whose replay worth is available in half from delicate shadings of acoustic reverb. During her lockdown-era inventive burst, Swift turned to the indie rocker Aaron Dessner for a extra contemplative set of songs. Antonoff’s smattering of contributions to Folklore and Evermore each slot in and stood out: “August,” “Mirrorball,” and “Gold Rush” rank amongst her biggest, and most distinctive, tracks ever.
Ascribing any track’s high quality to its producer, nonetheless, is dicey—particularly on the subject of Taylor Swift, an adept guitarist, piano participant, singer, and songwriter who’s typically one of the vital willful, self-directed celebrities in pop historical past. Starting along with her 2006 self-titled debut, she has written or co-written each authentic track she has put out. She has co-produced most of her albums as effectively. Still, she generally faces the sexist notion that she is a mere vessel for males. Last 12 months, the Blur singer Damon Albarn questioned her creative autonomy in an interview. Swift and her collaborators responded with ferocious corrections. “I’ve never met Damon Albarn and he’s never been to my studio,” Antonoff tweeted, “but apparently he knows more than the rest of us about all those songs Taylor writes and brings in.” (Albarn apologized.)
So any analysis of Midnights ought to begin from the proposition that it sounds the way it sounds as a result of that’s how Swift needed it to. Stacked harmonies, voice-of-God vocals, digital tinkling stuff—these Antonoff-ian tropes are what she likes proper now. Surely she hasn’t been tricked into making a repetitious album: She has the knowhow to listen to that “Snow on the Beach” rewrites “Gold Rush” and that “Vigilante Shit” apes what Lorde did on “Royals” a decade in the past. Her intention could also be so simple as first-thought-best-thought immediacy (the album got here collectively when she and Antonoff had been left alone whereas their companions had been each taking pictures a film). Or perhaps, as some followers assume, she is appearing like a self-referential, postmodern novelist by purposefully recycling songs to suit Midnights’ theme of reevaluating reminiscences.
For what it’s value, after a couple of week of listening, the album’s personal distinct sound world is rising. I’m loving the way in which that the oozing and panning noises of “Midnight Rain” conjure a sense of suspended time. I’m hung up on the twisty storytelling and last-dance wistfulness of “Question …?” And I’m appreciating that the album’s echoing manufacturing invitations you into the cave-like interiority of 1 girl’s psyche. The album’s limitations—lyrics that baffle reasonably than evoke, songs that coast on one musical thought—proceed to frustrate too. Many followers had hoped she’d construct on the route hinted at in tracks corresponding to “August” and “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” handing over a confessional rock epic of refinement and ambition. But she will nonetheless make that album. She can nonetheless make it with Antonoff, if she so chooses.